Present Awareness

We just went on a trip. It was a special experience for my boys because neither of them had flown on an airplane (where they were old enough to remember it).

They loved it.

But my older son (8) likes to live in The What’s Next Machine, constantly fretting about what we’re doing next instead of enjoying the moment we’re in now.

When are we leaving? When are we getting to the airport? When are we boarding? When are we taking off? When are we landing? He kept this up pretty much the entire trip—an endless barrage of questions focused on the next thing.

Now I know this isn’t unusual for young kids, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating as a parent who wants their children to enjoy life’s experiences. So I gave him my usual speech about life being about this moment, not constantly worrying about what’s next, and just enjoying where you are.

Did it land with him? Probably not.

Will I have to repeat it a thousand more times before he understands? Absolutely.

But then, as I’ve worked through many phases of communicating information about product development work, I came across the same sort of temporal challenges.

My son’s focus on what’s next is an example of living in the future. But looking at what’s behind us in the past can leave the same residue of missing the now.

That’s life. We’re on a journey to focus and live in the present moment. The past helps us learn and the future helps us plan, but the only thing that matters is right now.

Product work is emergent

Product work requires looking at what you’re doing through temporal lenses.

Past. You hold retrospectives, share blog posts and release notes, and look at how the work performed with analytics.

Future. You look at timelines, create project plans, and do your best attempt at simulating what will happen.

Present. You do the work, breaking it down into digestible daily tasks to make it easier to track work and see progress.

The Past informs.

The Future directs.

The Present focuses.

But there’s a problem; or at least an insidious subtext running through the daily work you’re doing: the past and the future hinder your ability to process new signals.

How? The present becomes an expression of the past and future. If you learned from something that happened and know where you’re headed, you use the thinking to focus your current energy. If something new comes in—even an important and valid something—you stay the course in the name of “focus.” I don’t think it’s a bad thing, but that’s why I say it’s insidious.

Focusing on what happened or what may happen is how you miss what’s really happening.

Each month, I meet with the sales team and do a presentation on all product updates over the past month. I share what shipped (past), what we’re working on (present), and what’s coming next (future). The present is there, yes, but it’s in the shadow of what was done and what’s next. It’s destined to be a future item in the next update, not a representation of the emerging signals we are actively pursuing. Like my son, the sales team is always asking about what’s next: When will X feature be done? Are we planning on updating Y? It’s a distraction from the current state of the product.

And it’s also not their fault. I framed the conversation like a sequence, so they asked questions that way. My son also saw the trip as a sequence of events instead of individual moments to notice and savor as unique experiences.

But in a complex system like software, past behavior is not always the best predictor of future performance, yet we fall into the trap of believing it will be.

The strongest teams follow the current and notice emerging signals, like fireflies fluttering in a midnight sky. When they catch them, they don’t worry about catching the next one. They study what they have, experience it, and use it to update their understanding of the world.

You notice what you look for

I continue to see value in emerging “streams” of work that naturally resolve through diligent effort. You notice the cluster of signals concentrating into a focused area. You name it. You identify the tension between where the product is and where you need to move it next—the next evolution. Then you experiment, complete batches of intentional updates, and find where to place strategic investments, assigning resources (time, money, people, energy, attention) to reach the desired outcome. You don’t get caught up in what’s behind or ahead. You stay focused of what’s right now.

That’s the change.

Past reflection and future planning are useful exercises. But they are not replacements for staying in the work, living in the current product, understanding your customers, and expanding your perspective with holistic data.

AI is an output factory. You can use it to generate worthless slop, or you can use it to transform sound judgement, taste, and intuition into something impactful. Instead of shipping a feature and moving onto the next one, stay and listen. Really listen. I bet you hear something you didn’t expect, or capture a signal to light the way forward in a new direction. Know where you’re going, but don’t forget where you are right now.

Present Awareness

Instead of another ritual to add to your team’s ongoing work, Present Awareness is a continuous practice to improve your intuition and find the best path forward.

The three principles are:

1. Live in the product.
2. Know the people you serve.
3. Surround yourself with signals.

Experience + Empathy + Evidence

Live in the product

When you’re working on a product, it’s easy to get lost in the next version. After all, your job is to constantly make the product better for customers. So that requires removing friction, increasing value, and living in the next state.

Most days, I’m either collaborating on Figma prototypes for far-off versions of the product, reviewing Pull Requests of incremental versions, or shaping new experiences of what’s to come. If you want to stay present, you can’t forget the live version of the product your customers are using and experiencing daily.

Use it. In production. Every day. Notice every friction point. Find the edges of what’s working and what doesn’t. As you do, you’ll notice more, which improves your intuition for priorities. I will often fix something that wasn’t on my list yet because I experienced it firsthand going through a specific workflow. With enough users, it’s probable someone else experienced it, too. Maybe they didn’t want to reach out. Maybe they churned because of it. Noticing and fixing issues is how you refine the quality of the product.

Live in the product.

Know the people you serve

Customers are not personas. They are real people with real beliefs, real values, and real motivations. They use your product to achieve specific outcomes. It’s your job to figure out what those are so you can help them succeed. To do so, you need to know who they are and what they’re trying to do. And you can’t get that information by staring at metrics. Numbers are blurred representations of the people you serve.

Talk to customers. Send surveys, ask simple questions over email, and go beyond what they are trying to do in your product to understand their worldview. Innovation lies in the space outside what your product is doing today. Staying present with your customers is how you best create the future vision of your product. Don’t just ask them for feedback about your product. Ask them about what problems they’re generally experiencing in their work. Stay curious and open to the answers, and you’ll regularly stumble on novel insights that change the trajectory of your work.

Know the people you serve.

Surround yourself with signals

Data is everywhere. It’s easy to dismiss most of it as noise. Some of it is. But the awareness you bring to it is how you develop the ability to find the signals.

I use quantitative data as a compass to seek qualitative insights. When a metric causes me to raise an eyebrow, I think of the question I want to ask, the specific customers I want to talk to, and the easiest way to capture feedback. The signal I notice in the metric helps form my theory of what it means, but that’s an assumption to validate with real people.

Claude makes terrible assumptions about data and states it as fact. If you don’t know the data well enough, it’s easy to fall into the AI trap of assumed certainty because LLMs are so good at parsing vast amounts of information. But interpreting data is an art of translation, requiring an innate understanding of how the data is instrumented, what it represents, and how it changes. I do the same eyebrow raising when Claude makes an obviously wrong assertion. Don’t ever blindly trust any data, let alone the translation from an AI model. Certainty is the enemy of curiosity.

Surround yourself with signals.

The Practice

So how can you turn this into a daily practice? It’s easy. You don’t have to dedicate hours or another scheduled block of time for it. It’s a practice, a habit.

1. Experience the product. I start every day trying to do core actions in the product as both a quality check and a way to experience it. Spend time in the product going through a workflow or experiencing a new area. Withhold judgement as someone who built it, trying to judge it like a customer.
2. Hear from a customer. I read and respond to every piece of feedback that comes in. It’s important. Talk to someone over email, read through feedback or support tickets, and get on video calls with customers. Listen for what they’re trying to accomplish, not just what they’re requesting.
3. Examine the signals. Look at usage metrics, feedback patterns, and emerging trends. Notice changes and contradictions so you can chase down your assumptions and improve your understanding of the product.

Stay Present

Living in the future is an important way to conceptualize the possibilities. Looking back is an important way to improve your understanding of what happened to make better decisions. But it’s also important to focus on what you’re doing right now, today, in this moment. Instead of letting the past and future pull you out of the present, stay in it. Immerse yourself in all the rich information so you can heighten your intuition and sense the way forward.

Noticing doesn’t mean acting. Sometimes you notice something and it’s enough to move you to action. But you also don’t have to. And maybe you shouldn’t.

Noticing raises your awareness so other signals cluster to either confirm its importance, hold it in the background, or let it naturally resolve over time.

Give each idea the attention it deserves.

Maintain your Present Awareness.